


time enough

by bell (bellaboo)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 18:51:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5509124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellaboo/pseuds/bell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eighteen years is time enough for beards to grow gray: snapshots of Obi-Wan on Tatooine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	time enough

0.

As a newborn baby (skin red, fingers pudgy, eyes squeezed shut), he looks nothing like Anakin Skywalker. Obi-Wan is grateful for this small mercy. 

I.

At first it's not so hard; there is Anakin's baby to look after. Owen and Beru are busy with the harvest and household chores, so they appreciate the free diaper-changing service, work too sensitive for a droid, that Obi-Wan provides. In between changing diapers Obi-Wan feeds the baby - Luke, it is hard to remember - and puts him to sleep, and takes him for walks, and talks to him, and does all the things a father would.

Actually, he remembers Luke's name fine; he pretends not to, it is easier to think of him as "the baby."

 

II.

Anakin has told him so much about his home planet (the sand, the buildings, the people, the suns) that Obi-Wan thought himself familiar with Tatooine; besides, hadn’t he been there before? Quickly he realized that staying on a spaceship and glancing out the window every now and then does not count as being on a planet. Though Anakin has told him everything, he has told him nothing. 

Culture shock takes its time to settle into Obi-Wan, as he is used to seeing new lands. It is after months of living in a house made of mud-bricks, months of rationing water, months of eating lean vegetation, that it hits him, because it is then that his body realizes: this is his new home. There is no going back to Coruscant.

 

III. 

After agents of the Republic nearly discover Obi-Wan and Luke Skywalker along with him, Owen bans the Jedi Master from their home. Besides, Luke is now old enough to be cared for by the droids or taken with his adopted parents to whatever task they're doing that day. They do not need Ben the baby-sitter.

Stripped of a purpose, a being to focus his energy on, an anchor into the present, Obi-Wan is forced to come face-to-face with his past. The demons have grown none the weaker in the meanwhile.

 

IV.

There is Qui-Gon to keep him sane, though their communications are rare and not the relief Obi-Wan expected them to be. The first time he sees his old Master again, untouched by time, he bows his head, conflicted by the memories of who he had once been and who he once could have been by now. His first words are, “I finally understand what it must have been to lose Xanatos.”

Qui-Gon, a spirit given shape by the Force, replies, "we are but human."

 

V.

News of Darth Vader's existence does not cause a heart-attack in Obi-Wan, but the feeling is close enough. He is not sure which is worse: the continued suffering of the universe or of Anakin Skywalker. If given that chance again to slay him, Obi-Wan knows he still wouldn't. Couldn't. So perhaps he is hypocritical in resenting the Force for not finishing the job, yet that is how he feels. 

 

VI. 

Obi-Wan keeps track of Luke through underhanded means-- spies, sensing through the Force and the like-- and rarely through his own eyesight. He does not lay eyes Luke for a few years, so when he glimpses him, through binoculars, at fifteen years of age, it is like traveling back in time. Like having his Padawan grin before running off and doing something his Master wished he wouldn't. Like those two decades in-between never happened. It is bittersweet, the feeling that grips him, and Obi-Wan doesn't know which of the two flavors is stronger.

 

VII.

Because his residence is light on electronics (never felt the need for them, and the desert's harshness slowly but surely renders them useless), he visits bars to watch the news. He is drinking a glowing blue drink, his favorite, half-paying attention to the HoloNet screen on the other end of the crowded hazy bar when Padmé appears. It is only for a brief second, the report is on someone else, and the resolution is fuzzy at best. Obi-Wan watches more closely now and is rewarded: Padmé appears again. Except that it's not the low quality of the reception that distorts Padmé's appearance; it is that it is not Padmé at all but Leia, the little baby girl he last saw seventeen years ago. 

Obi-Wan is capable of becoming one with the Force, yet he will never understand its ways.

 

VIII.

Now he is an old man. Eighteen years is a long time, and Obi-Wan finds that the sands have both softened and roughened him. When he talks to Luke (the young man comes for visits now, curiosity and independence bids him so) or sees Leia on the news, he feels none of those pangs that threatened so his mental state back then. Rather, his mind selects pleasant memories. It is a pleasure to see and hear the children of two people he loved and lost.

As old and wise he is, he has much to learn. For he thinks that the Force wants nothing more of him, that he is to die from age on this desert planet.


End file.
